Predicting Microsoft's Destiny

What a month for Microsoft. Depending on how the future unfolds the 30 days spanning mid-October to mid-November may be remembered as the beginning of the end of Microsoft's absolute reign of the PC desktop.

It started in late October with Sun Microsystems and IBM announcing, within 24 hours of each other, that they would port their popular Solaris and AIX UNIX OS to the Intel Xeon and Merced processor platforms.

That move could spell the end of Windows NT as a major league networking solution. The combination of the reliability, security and power of Unix on standard hardware systems available from dozens of vendors and thus very affordable, will be just too much for network administrators to resist.

Then came the antitrust trial, in which the government, with the aide of a dozen angry Silicon Valley top hightech executives is doing a lot more damage to Microsoft than anyone had anticipated. And equally surprising, Microsoft isn't putting up much of a defense. With a hostile judge, a flood of damaging internal email messages and a plenty of video taped testimony in which Bill Gates is seen falling into multiple legal traps, analysts are starting to doubt Microsoft can either win the case or limit the damage in the appeals process.

Most of the talk in the industry is now not so much on whether Microsoft will lose the case, but how badly. In case of the latter, Judge Jackson will be in position to leverage 'broad remedies', something that usually means breaking-up the company, the nuclear bomb of anti-monopoly law enforcement.

And now Netscape, America Online and Sun Microsystems are teaming up in a way that could break the Explorer's back. Add to that the Sun victory in the Java lawsuit and the impact of the alliance on the push the three will be able to put behind Java.

Microsoft doesn't appear too shaken up by all these events. And why should it. For all it knows or cares, the current developments will prove nothing but a few speed bumps on the road to continued market dominance. After all, there is no desktop alternative to Windows. And if Microsoft were to buy Yahoo! or another major internet player for what would be pocket change for Microsoft, it will be able to compete with AOL and Netscape.

But at least for the first time there is a concerted effort to ensure that Microsoft will not come to dominate every last major market related to the world of PCs. And that is about as much as we could have asked for.

PAUL SWART,





Silicon Valley News Service.

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